Your Second Formula One Race Is No Easier Than the First

American rookie Alexander Rossi fills us in on his second Grand Prix.

By
Alexander Rossi

Sep 30, 2015

Getty ImagesClive Rose

My second F1 race was the Japanese Grand Prix at the Suzuka Circuit, a track I had visited but never driven, let alone raced at, so it was all new to me. I had some travk experience in the sim, but that was in a 2013 car and was largely unrepresentative of how the 2015 package would perform. Oh, and it wasn't raining in the sim, so that was new too!

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Racing in Japan is incredible, the fans really are just about the most passionate and knowledgeable anywhere, so that makes it even more awesome. I was staying in a hotel right by the circuit, and you could feel the atmosphere all around Suzuka for the whole weekend. Thursday, even without cars on track, there were fans everywhere, and even with the rain on Friday it was packed. It's a privilege to race in front of such dedicated support and I can't wait to get back there next year.

After such a positive weekend in Singapore it was good to carry that momentum straight into the next weekend, but the weather made things a lot tougher. We knew it was going to be wet on Friday so the team deliberately opted for a safe plan, limiting us to just one installation lap in FP1 and then some development work in FP2. Knowing the rest of the weekend would be dry, there was little to learn on Friday so we minimized the risk of running in the wet and made sure we were set for Saturday.

In FP3 we went straight into a long run on heavy fuel, so we could get a feel for how the car would be on Sunday. These were my first dry laps of Suzuka, so I was learning the circuit as well as running to the plan we'd set with the engineers. As with most tracks, you pick it up quickly and the session was as good as we could have hoped for. Obviously I'd have liked more dry time for performance runs, but you deal with what is given to you and I was pleased to be in good shape for Sunday with some idea of how the car was going to perform in race trim.

One key thing that's working really well is my relationship with every area of the team. I know a lot of the guys from last year, and a few of them are people I'd worked with at Caterham, but I'm really building a good base with my race engineer and in the garage. They are doing everything they can to help me focus on my job.

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Getty ImagesMark Thompson

On Sunday it was dry, as expected, and before the race I had a really good experience in the driver parade lap. It's funny, you push like mad to make it to F1, and the team of people around me have worked so hard to help this become a reality, and on the parade lap in Japan it hit me; I'm in F1 and a primary race driver, not a reserve and not a test driver. The way the fans all around the circuit embraced me and all the other drivers was a very special feeling and one that finally told me the dream was real. That was a great way to head into the race, so thank you to the Japanese fans!

We started the race on the option tires but the car balance was not the optimum. We'd had some running on the option in practice, but unlike Singapore, at Suzuka I had to adjust some behaviors that I'd adopted in the cockpit to extract maximum performance from the car. Singapore is bumpy, tight and a bit stop/start, whereas Suzuka flows much more, the car obviously behaves very differently from a street course to a permanent road course.

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On that first set of options I was keeping good pace, but the package just didn't feel right, so we made an aero balance change when we went to the primes and it immediately felt better. Within two laps I'd closed the gap to my teammate and went on to finish ahead of him for the second race in a row. Realistically, that's the only goal right now and two out of two will do, especially considering the limits that we faced on Friday.

We had some drama to deal with late in the race when my teammate spun exiting 130R and created a giant wall of tire smoke. When it was happening, I originally wanted to go to the right because he was initially spinning to the left, but then he started to roll the opposite way. Honestly, what was going through my head was the age-old thing in NASCAR of driving into the middle of the smoke because the car's probably not there anymore. I didn't end up doing that, and considering I was doing 180-odd miles an hour, I was lucky to go left and avoid contact. At the time I didn't think it was that close, but after seeing the replays, I saw it was really close.

Another full race distance also helped me become better at racing in the position we are, as a team. With the blue flag rule you have to be very efficient in how you let other cars pass without losing too much time. That's another learning curve for me, but one I'm picking up well. Often, when you go offline to let a quicker car through, you're onto the marbles and the dust that accumulates off the racing line. That's not hard to control, in terms of how the car behaves, but the tyre temps drop and that's definitely an issue.

Maintaining tire temperature is critical to performance and degradation levels, so you have to manage that as well. On TV, to the untrained eye it looks like you just move over and the guy passes you, but inside the car that one maneuver can have a pretty dramatic effect on performance, so making sure you minimize that and maintain your own pace, to your own plan, is another important aspect I'm still working on.

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Physically Suzuka is also very different to Singapore. In Singapore it's about the longest race of the year, it's incredibly hot and humid and it's tough on everyone, so Suzuka was less demanding. But this is an area that my trainer Carlos is really helping with. He plays a huge role in my training and day to day, but for Singapore he was huge as we prepared for the most physical F1 race on the calendar.

Getty ImagesDan Istitene

Mentally, Suzuka was more of a struggle because I was fighting the car in the first stint. It improved quite a lot after, but I was still adjusting throughout the race; I don't think I drove any one lap the same. The track was evolving each lap, and I had to adapt with it. Singapore was the opposite; it was repetitive, and it was about being at your limit with no real changes to surface conditions. With Suzuka, the challenge was being at your limit with different grip characteristics each lap. It was taxing, but I also learned a lot from it.

Both F1 weekends have been huge from an educational standpoint. I've been around F1 long enough to know that there are huge demands placed on the drivers, with media, sponsors, briefings and debriefs with your engineers – everything that makes an F1 weekend tick, but I am very lucky that the people I place my faith in to help me do my job are at the top of their game, and that's helping make my first F1 experience so positive.

Straight after the race it was a dash back to the hotel, then a couple of train journeys to Tokyo for a flight back to the UK, my base during the season. I have about 36 hours at home before I head to Spain to prepare for Sochi and a switch back to GP2 with Racing Engineering.

Sochi is another circuit I haven't raced, but with a team that knows how to win, both races and Championships, the transition from F1 to GP2, and to a new track, is seamless. Mathematically we still have a shot at the 2015 GP2 title, but we need some luck to come our way, but you can't plan for luck so we will do what we've done all season - prepare well, fight hard and aim to keep up the performance levels that have seen us win twice in the last two rounds.

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